Haley Alt is a dystopian YA author whose three novels have sold more than 10,000 copies on Amazon under the name H. Alt. (The first half of her fourth novel, Godless, is available for free on Wattpad.) She recently moved back to the States after almost eight years in Japan, where she taught English, worked at a travel agency, and promoted sightseeing and did English translation for the town of Tateyama in Toyama. I met her through my work on the TRAM art and culture zine, and sat down with her at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Toyama City, where we talked about religion, her upcoming move back to America, how scary it is when people actually read your work, and how Tom Cruise helped her sell a lot of eBooks.
The pictures spread throughout the interview were all taken by Haley in Tateyama as part of her position as a coordinator for international relations (CIR).
I: I Did It, and Now I Can Move on to the Next Project
But I Also Have a Day Job: So let’s start from the beginning: When did you start writing?
Haley Alt: When I was about nine or ten, I started to get really into ghosts. I really liked horror movies as a kid, and I started researching ghosts and the supernatural, and I’d go to the library and wonder where all the research on ghosts was and why I could only find fiction. So then I would read fiction on ghosts and I started writing ghost stories. I remember in one of my earlier stories, this girl woke up and she had a number “9” on her forehead, and in the story she dies, and then wakes up and looks in the mirror and the number had counted down, so she only had 8 lives left or whatever. As I got older I got super into dystopian fiction, before it was cool.
BIAHADJ: How much older are we talking?
HA: Uh, thirteen—no, fourteen. This was around 2003 or 2004.
BIAHADJ: I’m trying to remember when dystopian fiction started to take off—I’m sure you know better than me.
HA: The book that got me into dystopian fiction was called Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld. It was about a society where when you turned sixteen you would undergo surgery to become beautiful, because if everyone was beautiful and everyone looked the same then there isn’t any war. It’s all about young love and adventure and finding out what’s important in life, and this weirdly structured society that prizes beauty over everything, and it’s just SO good. Look, I read The Hunger Games, I loved the Hunger Games, but there were dystopians before the Hunger Games. I mean, there was 1984, the ultimate dystopian novel.
BIAHADJ: Very true. People like to pretend that certain writers were the first ones who ever did something, but everybody has influences.
HA: Exactly. And after I got into dystopian I started working at Subway at sixteen, and I had an idea for a story, so I started writing it down on Subway napkins, and that became Oblivion, my first novel that I published.
BIAHADJ: How long did it take to go from the Subway napkins to the published book?
HA: Let’s see…It didn’t take me that long, probably because I wasn’t editing it, and didn’t know anything about how to write a book. [laughs] I think I wrote it in about six to nine months, just typing it into a document while I was writing ideas on Subway napkins for the next thing that would happen.
BIAHADJ: What did you do when you finished the draft?
HA: For the actual publishing—look, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just started cold-calling agents, via email, and being like, I’m Haley, I’m eighteen years old…
BIAHADJ: [laughs] Oh no!
HA: So that was my first mistake, telling them that I’m an eighteen-year-old who just wrote her first book.
BIAHADJ: Yeah, but you were still querying agents, which was more than I knew how to do at eighteen. Did you research the process yourself, or did you have somebody helping you?
HA: No, I just Googled it. I was like, How do you get a book published, Google-sensei? And then Google-sensei said, find an agent. So I found websites with lists of agents, what they’re looking for, what they publish, what they like, and then I started looking. Weirdly, it did not go well. To this day I love Oblivion like I’d love my first child, but I’m actually putting it up on Wattpad now and editing it as I go, because there’s just so much, God…[trails off embarrassedly]
BIAHADJ: But it’s your high school writing! We’re always going to be critical of our earlier work as we grow and mature!
HA: Yeah, but the fact of the matter is that a book will never be done, ever. It’s never going to be finished. You just have to get to a point where you’re either exhausted with it, or you have to stop for sanity’s sake and start the next thing, because you’re going to keep touching up.
BIAHADJ: How many agents did you query?
HA: Dozens and dozens. God, I have so many mistakes, but my second big mistake was probably cutting and pasting the query letter, and not trying to personalize it at all to the agent I was writing to. Not writing a good query letter would be the third big mistake, which is actually the first big mistake. And I’m getting better at writing query letters, but that I think is really an art form.
BIAHADJ: I think so too—you have to pitch your book in a concise way that grabs the agent’s attention, you have to summarize your writing history, you have to know the target audience, you have to list comp titles…
HA: You have to sound like you’re not an eighteen-year-old who just wrote her first book and hasn’t proofread it. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Had you proofread the book at that stage?
HA: I truly don’t even think that I did, I think I was just like, I did it! I’m done! Proofreading is for chumps! That was the lesson I’d taken away from it, until I realized, Oops! I’ve self-published this, because Amazon exists…[laughs]
BIAHADJ: When did you actually put Oblivion on Amazon?
HA: I must have done it when I was in college. And I got a physical copy published too, because in those days, I think less now, people would say they didn’t want an eBook version [laughs] so I got physical books printed using Createspace. The most success I had with selling books was when Tom Cruise came out with his movie Oblivion in 2013. I sold thousands of copies of Oblivion, and I made actual human dollars.
BIAHADJ: That’s amazing—I haven’t even seen that movie. About how many copies have you sold on Amazon?
HA: Of Oblivion? Over ten thousand, as a direct result of Tom Cruise’s movie coming out.
BIAHADJ: How much does Amazon give you for royalties?
HA: If you sell a book for $1.99 or less you get 30%, if you sell it for $2.99 or more you get 70%. So I started by selling at $1.99 and I think I upped it to $2.99 just because, again, it was a hobby, I wasn’t trying to make money off of it. If I had been smarter I would have changed my prices when I saw the numbers going up in 2013.
BIAHADJ: So you weren’t actively trying to make money.
HA: No, I wanted it to be cheap and accessible. But the problem is that when you make it too cheap, people think it’s not worth their time. Now I have my books for like $2.99, and yeah, it’s less than a cup of coffee. It’s really hard to find that balance.
BIAHADJ: And you still get royalties?
HA: Yeah, I do. I couldn’t put a number to it exactly, but every month I’ll see a little money come into my bank account, and it’ll say Amazon Kindle services, and I’ll be like [happy voice] Oh. I don’t check on it that much anymore. It’s kind of self-sustaining now, once you have it up, which is nice—I did it, and now I can move on to the next project.
II: I’m Always Going to Keep Growing
BIAHADJ: What was your main reason for publishing Oblivion?
HA: I wanted to get it out there. I wanted people to read it. Which is horrifying in a way now because I’m terrified of people reading my stuff.
BIAHADJ: My God, why?
HA: Like, you telling me that you read Godless, I may as well be standing on a cliff right now, because I’m like, that is horrible, I can’t believe you’ve done this. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Is it because you think I’m going to judge you?
HA: Oh, let’s list the things that could go wrong when people read the book! Yeah, you’re gonna judge it, because we’re humans who judge things. It could be bad—it could objectively be really bad. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: If it was bad, I wouldn’t have wanted to interview you—
HA: I don’t believe that—you could be making a satire article for all I know! [laughs] Then it’s…God, I mean…I could not be as good as I think I am, or as I hope I am.
BIAHADJ: OK, that’s a real concern.
HA: And my confidence goes up and down. Some days I’ll reread parts of Godless or parts of Oblivion and see that it has solid ideas and relationship turmoil—all that is definitely in there. The flip side is that if someone came up to me and was like, I read this, I didn’t like it, which, by the way, has happened to me before—
BIAHADJ: [aghast] In real life, or online?
HA: In real life. For the TRAM, I included an excerpt from my zombie novel Sunkissed because I was writing for TRAM while I was an ALT, and at a hanami [cherry blossom viewing] event, someone came up to me and was like, “Yeah, I read your excerpt, and it was just not good, it was just not written well, I didn’t like it.” And we were both drunk, because it’s hanami, and I was like, “Thank you for your feedback,” and walked away and forgot about it until three days later, and then I remembered the conversation and it hit me that this might actually be fine.
BIAHADJ: In what way?
HA: That she didn’t like it. And I’m not even excusing it as “Maybe she doesn’t like zombies.” If my writing doesn’t appeal to some people, that’s OK. If my writing doesn’t appeal to most people, that’s OK. I’m not sure how much I’m writing to be heard, and how much I’m writing because I have things to say, but my favorite part is just writing things that haven’t been written yet. It was in theory the worst thing that could happen to someone who created something, but I rolled with it.
BIAHADJ: Why do you think she said that? Just to hurt your feelings?
HA: I don’t know…maybe. I mean, she was not a nice person. [laughs] Like outside of this scenario also, she was just mean, but she spoke her mind, and she was being true to herself by saying that.
BIAHADJ: Like, she didn’t want to lie and tell you the excerpt was good because that would be a false platitude?
HA: Maybe she was just feeling brave. Maybe she just wanted to tell me, “Don’t quit your day job honey.” So that happened, and it was fine, and to this day I still love Sunkissed, and I’ve still got good reviews on that book. They could be better, I think they’re a little above average, but to me that just means that I have more growing to do—I wrote those books when I was twenty. I’m always going to keep growing, and one of the things I’m most excited about is that I have the rest of my life to read and to write, and I’m going to change and grow and improve in so many ways. So in the end I don’t care if people like it, but when people say they’re going to read my stuff, there’s a part of me that’s like, uhhhhh….no thanks. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Would you rather have people you know read your work, or strangers you don’t know on the internet read it?
HA: Strangers, absolutely. Strangers reading my stuff doesn’t bother me that much—people I know reading my stuff makes me feel like I’m standing naked in front of a crowd being judged.
BIAHADJ: Yes, there’s something extremely vulnerable about taking this art that you’ve created and putting it out into the world for people to judge or make fun of. It can also happen because of the themes we discuss—like even if the work itself is good, people could get upset about the subject matter because of your views on, say, sex or religion.
HA: And I have written something controversial with Godless. I was raised Catholic, and I became atheist around the time I came to college, which I don’t think is a coincidence.
BIAHADJ: Is there a story behind that?
HA: [laughs] Well, it started in high school, when I’d already stopped going to church with my parents because the church kept asking for money, and they were like…we’re a middle-class family, we’re already giving what we can.
And in high school my friend Kat was super religious, but not in a stuff-it-down-your-throat kind of way, just in a she-REALLY-believed-in-God kind of way, and she joined a youth Bible study group where you go to church. And I was like, she’s my best friend, maybe I’ll try this out too. It was a nice community, and people are nice, there’s nothing wrong with believing in religion, the problem comes when you use it to hurt people.
One time we watched Passion of the Christ at the Bible leader’s house, and I asked her—because at the time I was on the fence—what happens if you don’t believe in God. To her credit, she REALLY did not want to answer that question—but I was like, Come on, tell me! If I don’t believe in God but I’m a good person, what happens? And she said that I would go to hell. And I got real disconcerted about that, and then the next morning I remember waking up and thinking, I’m going to be a Christian.
BIAHADJ: Seems like a natural response.
HA: But, then lo and behold, after a few weeks of reflecting, I go into Bible Club, and I’m like, Why would good people go to hell? And then, if there’s a heaven, and people are forgiven for their sins, does that mean rapists and murderers can be in heaven? And if that’s true, then the people they’ve affected would certainly not want them in heaven, so does that mean that there are multiple heavens, like, segregated? Now that seems like that should be written somewhere in the Bible. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: I think there are a lot of younger people with these kinds of questions, but maybe they don’t know how to ask them, or they’re afraid to think too deeply about them because of what they might find.
HA: The thing that really gets me is that Godless is not even fiction. There are countries that are following the Quran, or any other holy book, to a T, and putting women in terrible positions where they’re financially dependent on men they don’t love that they’re forced to have sex with. There are people who are literally killed because of who they love or how they love, or for wanting a better future for themselves, or for wanting to leave. That’s happening in the world right now.
BIAHADJ: Was this the first time you were able to take issues you felt strongly about and work them into your fiction? As opposed to, say, with Oblivion?
HA: For sure. With Oblivion I was just making a fantasy story, but in Godless it became really important that I talked about it, and I used the Bible as a guideline, but what I used in it was a reflection of this society that’s been created, that even in America we’re still fighting.
A kamoshika, or Japanese serow, a member of the goat-antelope family and the prefectural animal of Toyama.
III: Pursuing Art is Really Really Really Really Hard
BIAHADJ: So you were in college at this time, and just writing on the side?
HA: Yeah, exactly.
BIAHADJ: Were you taking any writing classes?
HA: You know…one of my regrets now is that I didn’t major in English.
BIAHADJ: Why?
HA: Well…[laughs] I want to write now, that’s why. I’m seeing all these writing positions that need a major in journalism or English or copywriting, or, you know, insert some major here that’s relevant to writing, so in hindsight I wish I had done Japanese and English majors. I think at the time I was under the impression that writing would only ever be a hobby for me.
BIAHADJ: What made you think that?
HA: The world.
BIAHADJ: [laughs] Tell me about that—that’s big stuff.
HA: My parents were not uninvolved in my life, but they weren’t like, checking all my homework and stuff. I was a straight-A student, but my parents didn’t go to college, so there wasn’t that insane pressure of telling me I had to go here or I had to go here, I was just figuring it out as I went as a seventeen-year-old. So I was just like, I guess I’ll apply to UW-Madison and write this essay and not proofread it and send it and somehow get in.
BIAHADJ: Had you thought about a major?
HA: At the time I was also very big into art. I was drawing a lot, and that started from an interest in manga, and then anime, which I do not have anymore. I do draw sometimes, but not so much, just for people if they want something. I remember having a conversation with my aunt when I was applying for colleges, and I was like, I want to do art or Japanese, and she was like, I’m going to tell you right now, pursuing art is really really really really hard, and you have to be really really really really good. I think from that day on, I was like, Japanese is more practical, I can do something with that. I can be a translator, a big-person job.
BIAHADJ: When your aunt said that did it make you question your passion?
HA: No. To me I felt like she was right and I probably don’t have it. I just accepted it.
BIAHADJ: I think the difference is that people can be realistic and tell you that it’s really hard, but that you can still go for it if that’s what you really want. Or, they can tell you that it’s really hard in a way that’s meant to discourage you and convince you not to try, and I think there’s a certain kind of well-intentioned adult who does the second one.
HA: I think in retrospect I lumped drawing in with all kinds of art, including writing, and I think I told myself that it was just a hobby I do for fun, and maybe for strangers on the internet to read, and that’s all it’s going to be. And it’s fine if people read it, but part of me doesn’t want them to read it—but I kind of want them to read it, because being famous would be very awesome and [facetious voice] I think I’d handle fame very well and wouldn’t let it go to my head at all.
BIAHADJ: [laughs] It’s fun to joke about, but there’s an important question there—are you interested in being famous or well-known?
HA: Oh yeah…isn’t that crazy for someone who couldn’t believe you read my book? I guess I do want my stuff to be read. I don’t even care if people like it, I just want it to be read.
BIAHADJ: I think it’s human nature to want to be heard and to want to share ideas with others.
HA: I think it’s satisfying when someone reads what I wrote and says they really like it, because I created something that didn’t exist before and someone read it, and it affected them. Even if it was with that girl who came up to me at hanami and said I did not like this, I bite my thumb at you, sir, I made an effect on something, I was here. I think that’s something that drives me, that I was present on this earth and I did this thing, and someone’s going to know it because I have books online, which means it’s going to be in the universe forever. That’s cool.
BIAHADJ: The idea that we can attain permanence in some way, more than with just our names on a genealogy tree, or on a headstone in a graveyard somewhere.
HA: Which is going to disappear someday. I mean, all of it will disappear someday, but if those ideas implement another idea in someone else’s head, that’s kind of me living on. I’ll say it—my books are my Horcruxes.
IV: I Was Not Working Toward That Goal
BIAHADJ: Did you continue writing after college?
HA: So that’s when things really started slowing down, when I got a full-time job. I wrote most of Godless senior year, and then I think that summer.
BIAHADJ: Was it difficult to balance a senior year course load with writing this very ambitious novel?
HA: Yeah, I was so stressed out all the time. Senior year of college was the worst time of my life anxiety-wise, and I had just come back from a study abroad in Japan. I didn’t know it yet, but I was depressed and experiencing reverse culture shock. When I started writing, it just started pouring out, which is why I feel like I have a dam built up in me now, because I haven’t written a novel since Godless, and that was in 2014 or 2015.
BIAHADJ: So when you say you finished Godless in 2015, you mean finished and fully edited, or you mean finished, got to the end of a first draft?
HA: I mean finished, like I wrote it from start to finish. And then over the next few years I edited it while I was working in Japan. And then I had people read it and edit it, and give me feedback. I had five people who were interested in helping me out, so I had them edit it, and that was the first time I did that. Until then it was just me proofreading, which means…[laughs]
BIAHADJ: You miss stuff…
HA: You ALWAYS miss stuff. Which is why I’m editing it as I’m putting it on Wattpad, because it’s just a nightmare.
BIAHADJ: What was behind the decision to put Godless and your other novels on Wattpad?
HA: A girl I went to school with named Ali Novak wrote a book called My Life With the Walter Boys, and it has millions of reads. She had put it up on Wattpad, she was discovered on Wattpad, she got an agent through Wattpad, she was published officially by that agent, and they’re making a TV show based off of it. My jealousy is insurmountable—but, good for her…
BIAHADJ: You had that jealousy we all get when people we know grow up to be more successful than us?
HA: But I’m very proud of her. I realized that the most important thing I took away from that was not that I was jealous—everyone’s going to be jealous of someone who’s doing something you want to be doing—it was that I was not working towards that goal. I wasn’t doing anything for it. I hadn’t deserved it—I hadn’t been writing for years, I hadn’t looked at Godless. Between 2015 and 2017 or so I maybe glanced at it a few times, edited it lightly, and moved on. I hadn’t tried to put my stuff out there at all, and that was a wake-up call that if I want to be writing, I need to tell people I’m a writer, I need to put my stuff out there for them to be able to read it, and I need to be emailing agents and—I have to be writing! One of the most important things about writing is writing, and I wasn’t writing. So it was a really big wake-up call, so I was like, screw it, I’ll do that, I can do that.
So then I put all my stuff up on Wattpad. Godless is very very, very well edited now, fortunately, and it took several years and I have not been able to write as much as I want since getting a full-time job. When I go home, I’m tired. I work 45 hours a week, 8:15 to 5:15 every day, and I can actively feel the full-time work suffocating me of my creative ambition. I don’t have the energy.
BIAHADJ: So what is a typical evening like when you come home?
HA: Man, I feel like I barely go home. [laughs] This is actually another big part of it—I started to get more active in my mental and physical health, so three years ago I started going to the gym three or four times a week and running. I’ve been meditating, and I had therapy, which I love—EVERYONE should go to therapy. If there’s one message that anyone should take away from this, it’s go to therapy, because it’s amazing.
Then I have a very active social life, and I practice kyudo, Japanese archery, so I’m doing that two times a week, so my schedule is insane to the point that I only have Tuesdays to do what I want—and what are we doing today? What day is it…? Tuesday. So I don’t really have any mental space for anything, and when I do get to sit down, I’m going to watch TV or play a video game, I’m not going to write. It’s hard to motivate myself to do that.
BIAHADJ: You’re not alone in that respect. Social life is important, physical health is important, mental health is very important, and hobbies that aren’t creative work are very important. So you can either cut one of those areas, or you can cut your Day Job, but maybe you can’t because you need the money. It’s very hard to balance all those things.
HA: I think at the end of the day it’s about prioritizing. There’s only so much time in a day, and if you’re really serious about writing, you’re going to be writing. And for me it’s taken the backburner for so long.
V: I Literally Gave Him the Finger Guns
BIAHADJ: Why did you come on the JET Programme after college?
HA: Because I wanted to be in Japan. They asked me to be an ALT [Assistant Language Teacher], and I said yeah, so lo and behold, it’s fate because I’m sent to Toyama, the most beautiful prefecture in Japan, and Tateyama, the most beautiful town in the most beautiful prefecture in Japan, and I was there for three years as an ALT.
BIAHADJ: And then you were able to stay in Japan?
HA: Yes, I quit because I wanted to do a job that used more Japanese, so I took a travel agency job in Kanazawa.
BIAHADJ: How did you get the travel agency job?
HA: I applied for it through a Facebook group called AJET job listings, and they had posted there because they’d had previous JETs work for them. I passed the interview and the guy liked me, and I got the job. At the job I ended up doing a lot of writing—I was writing blurbs for locations.
BIAHADJ: Was that something you wanted to be doing?
HA: Yes. I was like, [high-pitched voice] I like writing, let me do that! So I started writing blurbs for museums or what people can do here, and what is this scenery like and what’s famous here. Then nine months later the CIR [Coordinator for International Relations] job was made for me in Tateyama town, which happened again from knowing people, because the Education Department director and I just happened to run into each other at a kyudo event, and I was like, By the way, if you have any jobs for me, let me know!
BIAHADJ: Bit of the ol’ networking…
HA: I literally gave him the finger guns, and then didn’t think about it for six weeks until he called me and was like, So, we’re making a CIR position for you, would you like it? And I was like [exaggeratedly pleading voice] Uh, yes, yes, I wanna be back in Tateyama! I love it there. [normal voice] But then the woman I’d worked with at the travel agency was like, Oh, you’re a great writer, we like what you’re doing, let’s keep writing. And then I was actually paid to write, I was a freelance writer, that was the first time that happened—I was like, Holy moly it’s happening, is anyone seeing this right now??? I’m writing and I’m getting paid money for it!
So I did that for a year and I really liked it and then they insourced my job, in that they got someone from the company to write. But now, good news, it’s a few years later and she’s contacted me again for writing work, so hopefully that’ll continue.
BIAHADJ: Do you want to be doing more freelance writing?
HA: Yes. So now, my big move is—truthfully, if I’m speaking from my heart, it’s taken me a very, very long time for me to get to this—I want to be writing. That’s the big deal.
BIAHADJ: Writing fiction, or writing anything?
HA: Writing anything. I’ll start with writing anything and then writing stuff that I like. But I need to be writing. Like, before it was just this dream that I had, this hobby, this thing that couldn’t make money, and now I’m realizing I could make money from it, I am doing this thing, whether it’s freelance copywriting, or working on a new book. I want to be writing, and I want to be writing regularly, and I’ve already started acting like a writer, which is in fact the most important step to becoming a writer, is to act like one.
BIAHADJ: I think so, as long as you move beyond the superficial aspects, like drinking too much or owning a typewriter.
HA: I think acting the part is the most important step to doing anything. If you want to be fit, act like a fit person. I lost like thirty pounds, and the way I did it is, I’ve never seen someone who runs regularly not be fit, so I was like, I’m going to act like a fit person. Would a fit person eat cupcakes for breakfast? No. They would make eggs.
BIAHADJ: That makes sense—a move like, say, making your website where you put all of your writing projects front and center is a big step toward acting like a writer.
HA: Yes! That took me forever—the website was the first big step.
BIAHADJ: And how do you feel about the transition?
HA: Sometimes I want to throw up from how nervous I am thinking about it.
BIAHADJ: Why?
HA: Failure. No money. People need money. Haley need money. Haley no money, Haley no living.
BIAHADJ: Do you have money saved?
HA: I have money saved, so I do have a safety net. And I’ll be living with my mom and dad—living the millennial dream—and saving money. And my mom’s going to be happy anyway after my living in Japan for seven and a half years. I don’t know if she’ll let me leave, to be honest. My dad is the A type, proactive—everyone should have a job all the time.
BIAHADJ: Are you worried about parental pressure that you work constantly and bring in money?
HA: For sure. I don’t know how much of that is internal and how much is external, but if I turn it into something lucrative it’s not going to be a problem.
BIAHADJ: As in, your parents would be more accepting?
HA: Yes. It’s scary, and I want them to approve of what I’m doing, and I think I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to do well. To my parents the most important thing is that I’m happy, but the second most important thing is that I can make a living for myself. My parents aren’t going to live forever, so they want to make sure that I’m going to be well taken care of. And I think it would concern them if I took too long of a break from a traditional full-time job.
BIAHADJ: Is that because a full-time job creates the appearance that you’re working hard, or is it because of the income and security it provides?
HA: That’s some of it, and I think having an income is vital. Something that I have been doing is when I do copywriting work, or freelance translation—which I started doing in November—is that I regularly tell my parents. I’m on my computer, I’m actually working—it’s incredible, it’s called the internet.
BIAHADJ: Yes—being on your computer looks like goofing off, when it could very well be productive and bringing in income.
HA: Work doesn’t look like work anymore. To my dad work looks like being in a factory from 5am to 3pm every day, half days on Saturdays, and then days off on Sundays. That’s work. My mom worked at a factory too for a while, so I think they have that tradition. They’re not the kind of people who think you can still walk into a place and hand over your resume and be like, Hire me! They’re not that bad, but if I can at least take a few months to just focus on my writing, that would make me happy.
BIAHADJ: Last question: What was it like realizing you had to quit your job and make this major life change? Did it take you a long time to realize you weren’t where you wanted to be?
HA: Yeah, because I guess I thought if anywhere would motivate me it would be a place as open and chill and slow-moving as Toyama…and then I realized that I wasn’t really writing, and for a while I wasn’t really even reading either. You have to actively try to do it, otherwise it’s not going to happen. So that’s why I want to actively try to do it in the next few months and hopefully I see some kind of results that tell me I’m not completely terrible at writing. [laughs] If I can do that, I can hopefully do something.
You can read the first half of Haley Alt’s YA novel Godless on Wattpad , or check out her other work on her website or her Amazon page.